So it was all mobile (by 1993 standards) and converged and everybody was
happy. Except everybody was basically a handfull of lucky academics and
things weren’t all that pretty most of the time.

At some point regular people started to get online and that was done through
commercial isps or walled gardens like aol and compuserve which sold access
and wasn’t all that interested in selling mobility. So the expensive storage
was pushed out into the edge into people’s pcs through pop and information
got basically locked up in an inaccessible dead end.

This was kind of the dark ages of the budding internet. People were trying to transition to wintel, microsoft was fighting the internet and trying to trick people to sign into their own bbs system, msn, styled after the dying models of compuserv and aol. We had html2 and then 3, marquee text and bookmarks files. Mailbox files and bookmarks files and everything was files, at least until your disk died.
You had your work email account and your home email account and pretty much nothing in between. Mobility repioneers had to rent servers somewhere in the internet to push email and bookmarks (manually sadly) back into the network. The server hosting this pages is one of those. It was expensive, and tedious to keep together.

Meanwhile the internet was getting less clunky, despite microsoft internet explorer 5.x (ye gods!!), and storage was getting cheaper and hotmail emerged of its post-buyout nonworking times and by 1998 email was liberated back into the web.

Redoing the site came about for two main reasons. One was me not being happy
with the n-year old content in the old site and with the zombie book of
days. The second, unsurprisingly, was me wanting to tinker with current web
technologies.

The engine decision was pretty easy, i already used blosxom in the past and
i pretty much like it for all the blosxomy reasons. The design itself was on
the other hand excrutiating as i’m very much not a designer.

So it started as a technical exercise in xhtml/css which proved in itself pretty depressing as xhtml1.0/css2.0 isn’t particularly more interesting than html4.01 in terms of splitting content and design which again i like to think is the reason why all web designs are fixed pixel-acurate typographical designs (as opposed to the web designers being a bunch of dolts who can’t transition from paper to screen). In the end getting a nice multicolumn flowed design turned out pretty difficult both cause float doesn’t really work that well and flowed layout depends on the block order in the content side of things, not the layout side of things. And of course, i was cheating and ignoring the multitude of css bugs on ie6 to avoid utter madness.

In parallel it seemed a good idea to go utterly web2.0 and thick-client and push all non-static content to the browser. That was obviously a ploy to play with jQuery and newer versions of Dojo. So i had content being pulled from feeds, put into accordions and tabs all very much dynamic and moving on the browser.
And then it dawned on me it was all very daft. Nothing was actually being accomplished, i was creating huge load times, breaking box models left and right (hello microsoft!), fighting doms and nothing was accessible anyway. And in the end, most people would be viewing the content through a feed aggregator and would never touch the site itself. So that would be a wasted month if i didn’t come out of it much more experiences in the horrors of the web.

So in the end most of the stuff got scratched, all javascript went away, content got constructed server side and floats went away.
On the down side tables came back. Here xhtml/css is much better than html4. Instead of tables going into html they came back on css so we get divs that render as tables and we don’t break semantics but we can’t influence render order in css so we end up saying the table layout in html.

Eventually, 10 years from now, browsers will catch up to xml/css3 and i’ll be happy happy doing server side components that spew out xml that’s perfectly laid out by a designer i’ll wont need to know.